Direct marketing is a $150+ billion industry, while market research and polling account for another $40+ billion each year. Increasing use of online commerce and social media creates new opportunities and presents new challenges for direct marketing and market research. Cost effective direct marketing and market research requires effective and efficient techniques for identifying the most appropriate target audience for each particular direct communication project and ensuring that the direct communication recipients actually read the polling or marketing information delivered to them. Properly identifying and motivating the target audience is often more important, and expensive, than locating raw address data to work with. While social media has experienced tremendous growth and contains a wealth of information concerning potential target audiences, direct marketing systems have not been developed to leverage this resource to advance market research and polling objectives.
Effective advertising and market research continue to be the keystones of a successful business. Despite continuing efforts to utilize online resources effectively, prior approaches to online market research and polling have been highly inaccurate with cost-prohibitive technical barriers preventing more accurate results. In addition, prior attempts to incorporate online resources into advertising have experienced very poor click-through and response rates. Existing technology for incorporating social media into market research and polling remains cumbersome and inaccurate. As a result, the current lack of affordable and effective direct marketing and research platforms presents a major barrier to entry for many companies, especially small and medium-sized businesses, which cannot afford to expend the vast sums necessary to reach their target audiences.
More generally, there is a further need for situational awareness of the demographic makeup and topical interests of people located in different geographic areas. This would allow very specific targeting and assessment of the size of targeted market segments before going to the expense of conducting promotional and market research activities. This type of situational awareness system would present useful information for a wide range of purposes other than advertising and market research activities. While this type of system can be extremely powerful, it also presents security concerns that could limit participation. These security concerns can therefore be addressed to prevent undesirable conduct and alleviate potential concerns that might otherwise inhibit members from providing access to their real-time location and profile data in order to participate in the situational awareness system.
There is, therefore, a continuing need for improved situational awareness systems and, more specifically, a situational awareness system to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of market research and polling systems.